Writer: Anna Manuelli
Anna Manuelli’s new play People premiering at the Camden Fringe 2025 begins with the premise that seven people in the world are likely to have your face simultaneously, but rather than exploring that idea in the here and now, Manuelli travels back in time to four generations of philosophising women each reflecting on the political concepts of their day. People gets a little muddled as it unfolds but the premise and Manuelli’s development of character is well -grounded.
In the early twentieth-century a young woman holds a man hostage, determined to punish him for his crimes and insight her people to an uprising. Three decades later and that man’s daughter tells her companion about the impossibility of wealth redistribution. A sister shares her ideas about unhappiness and the problems of nostalgia while in the present day a party girl and her friend discuss her beauty and existential panic about the meaning of life.
People starts, strong, launching immediately into a heightened monologue in which a peasant woman lists the war crimes of the man she has apprehended, berating him about the nature of war and the death they can all expect. Focusing on the meaning of ‘Love thy neighbour,’ Manuelli forces the audience to piece together the disaster that has befallen this place, creating the backdrop to the scenario slowly and raising the temperature by degrees until the man’s culpability is established and the woman’s gift for rhetorical flourish is put to good use.
The same pattern applies to the second character, an evidently wealthy woman who reveals a connection to the first setting but offers an alternative perspective on the feasibility of equality and the impact of her father’s war service. Manuelli’s dialogue begins to ramble a little, taking the character longer to get to the point while the text could more pointedly explore the distance between the possibility of change that the first scene suggests and its failure to materialise decades later when the rich remain as they were.
Scene three feels the most tangential to the others, a dislocated speech about the nature of human happiness and the restlessness of humanity inspired by a book the character has read. Speaking to her brother who has attempted suicide but failed, there is far less texture here than in the other scenes, set in an unclear era and less obviously tied into the surrounding segments through family connections, making this section feel overly philosophical and abstract where the others have been more obviously focused on shifts in power across the last century.
The final scene is a stronger character, a self-involved influencer who lives for the adoration of men, speaking to her friend of her irresistibility but the concept needs work. The granddaughter of the first woman, the presence of that female crusader could be more keenly felt in the vacuous life that Manuelli presents here, taking time to comment on the changing roles for women in the last hundred years or the reduction of self that has occurred. An interesting concept but these women need to share more than a face to make a time-travelling drama to work; they also need to have something to say about how much the world has changed and how little humanity has changed alongside it.
Runs Until 23 August.
